QuadTech in Third Infringement Action against QIPC

On Tuesday, QuadTech Inc., Sussex, Wis. filed suit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California alleging Q.I. Press Controls' (QIPC) Intelligent Density System infringes QuadTech's U.S. patent covering positioning of an imaging device.

It is QuadTech's third legal action against QIPC. QuadTech is a subsidiary of commercial printer Quad/Graphics. QIPC was founded and is owned by former QuadTech employees.

In 2008, a German court stopped QIPC from infringing a similar patent in Germany and preventing QIPC from selling its mRC system there. A year later, QuadTech filed suit in federal court in Pennsylvania, alleging that QIPC's mRC, in mark and markless mode, infringes a QuadTech patent. No trial date has been set for that case, in which the judge earlier this spring declined to issue a preliminary injunction preventing QIPC from marketing its mRC.

In its "official statement" regarding legal action taken by QuadTech, QIPC says, in part: "The patent at issue, which discloses a registration-control system that does not rely on registration marks to perform color-to-color registration, will expire in approximately two years. As of the date of the lawsuit, Quad/Tech had not implemented the patent into a commercially available color-to-color registration system that operates without registration marks."

Denying infringement by products QIPC offers for sale in this country, and asking the court to award the costs of its defense, the statement goes on to say that the company does not "offer for sale a 'markless' register control system in the United States," and that the register-control systems it does offer in the United States "cannot operate in a 'markless' manner."